Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research recently discovered a new way to improve yeast tolerance to ethanol for the production of Biofuel.

Ethanol is produced by transforming corn and other plant materials using yeast as the main ingredient.

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Gregory Stephanopoulos, professor of chemical engineering at MIT along with his team discovered that by adding potassium and hydroxide ions to the medium in which the yeast are grown, they can increase the yeast's tolerance to high concentrations of ethanol.

They believe the new discovery will have a significant impact on the industrial production of biofuels.

Yeast normally gets affected by the toxicity of high concentrations of ethanol which restricted its use in production of biofuels.

By altering the composition, the researchers were able to increase the production of ethanol by 80 percent.

At first, the team used a different approach to increase the tolerance by searching for a group of genes that could be manipulated, but came back with no results.

"The more we understand about why a molecule is toxic, and methods that will make these organisms more tolerant, the more people will get ideas about how to attack other, more severe problems of toxicity," said Stephanopoulos.

"This work goes a long way to squeezing the last drop of ethanol from sugar," said Gerald Fink, one of the researchers behind the experiment.

TagsEthanol, Yeast, Biofuel, Biofuel Production, MIT, Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Reseach